Ron Fresen denkt dat als de mensen maar iedere maand netje over inflatie worden geïnformeerd, dat ze het dan niet meer erg vinden dat alles wel duurder wordt, maar niet goedkoper. Want hee. In oktober 2022 was de inflatie 14%, en nu maar 3,5%, dus waar zeurt iedereen nou over? Bovendien is inflatie noodzakelijk voor economische groei en het is gewoon belangrijk dat we de inflatie op een bestuurlijk verantwoorde manier over alle prijzen verdelen. En hee. Gedoe in de Straat van Hormuz is van alle tijden, vraag maar aan Leo Lucassen!

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Alles is vies, vuil, smerig, goor maar niet schoon en wel een troep in Amsterdam, en dat is niet pas sinds gisteren het geval maar JA21 Amsterdam is er wel mooi klaar mee. Daarom zet de partij het ultieme wapen in tegen de gemeente die we kennen van oplossingen als géén prullenbakken, peperdure grofvuil-bakfietsen om juist niet te gebruiken en stinkkliko's voor karton en GFTE om lekker frisjes in de portiek te posteren: een X-actie (Xie?). Al bijna een maand lang plaatst de partij elke dag een foto van troep in Amsterdam begeleid met de tekst: "Tot Amsterdam weer schoon is: elke dag een foto van de troep." Nou weet JA21 Amsterdam ook wel dat deze actie niet eeuwig vol te houden is, omdat de hoofdstad nu eenmaal nooit schoon zal zijn, en hoewel het de allersmerigste kanten van X toont mag dit best ludiek heten. Exemplarisch bovendien, want waar het de gemeente bijvoorbeeld wél telkens lukt om met de prikstok precies dat verfrommelde papiertje waar 'GAZA' op staat tussen het vuil vandaan te plukken, wordt de Amsterdammer de viezigheid gewoon vol in het gezicht gesmeten met al dat zwerfafval. Het is dus maar goed dat PRO, bekend van capabele wethouders uitzoeken, wethouder Troep en Vuil Hester van Buren niet op laat gaan voor een tweede termijn. Wel benieuwd welke vuilnisman (OF VROUW) de Amsterdammers ervoor terugkrijgen en wanneer JA21 Amsterdam de X-actie bij het vuilnis zet.

With bodies composed of ghostly ferns, flowers, and fungi, Molly Devlin’s fantastical and ethereal acrylic portraits invite us into a dreamy woodland realm. Her works tap into the beauty and resilience of living creatures, from a white bear cloaked in translucent butterflies to a diminutive mouse composed of different lifecycle phases of a dandelion. Part fauna and part flora, each elegant animal is a reminder of nature’s interconnectedness.

Devlin is currently working toward a solo exhibition opening in early August at Corey Helford Gallery in Los Angeles. She’s also finishing up a mural in collaboration with S.V. Williams along the American River in Sacramento. See more on Instagram.

Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $7 per month. The article Spectral Fronds and Flowers Comprise Elegant Animals in Molly Devlin’s Paintings appeared first on Colossal.

AI workloads are eating into datacenter capacity faster than most operators can add to it, and once the power budget is spent and the racks are full, the wall is a physical one. Server consolidation, once treated as a long-term efficiency project, has become an immediate operational priority. In our latest Hot Seat, Tim Phillips talks to Kira Boyko, product manager at Intel, about how the Intel Xeon 6+ processor with 288 efficient cores has been engineered with core density in mind to address that constraint. Many organizations cannot easily build new datacenters or expand the ones they already have, Boyko explains, particularly at the edge. That makes consolidating legacy servers onto a denser, more efficient platform the practical route to immediate efficiency and TCO gainsIt also recovers space and power budget that the next generation of AI infrastructure will demand. The Intel Xeon 6+ processor is built for that high-density environment, with particular relevance for 5G core and cloud-native use cases. Consolidation and AI expansion, Boyko argues, can no longer be treated as separate exercises. Retiring older server estates onto Intel Xeon 6+ is how operators create the headroom their next AI deployments will require. Watch the Hot Seat for Boyko's view on the case for upgrading, the performance and efficiency gains on offer, and how soon Intel Xeon 6+ can be put to work. You will learn about: Server consolidation as your AI enabler: Why retiring older Xeon servers onto Intel Xeon 6+ can recover fleet footprint and energy budget, and why that recovery is likely to be a precondition for AI innovation across many service providers. New in Intel Xeon 6+: The shift to Intel's 18A manufacturing process doubles the core count and delivers a five-fold increase in last-level cache, alongside faster memory. This product is engineered for core density and delivers performance per watt, efficiency and TCO gains through consolidation. Help for 5G and edge environments: Why performance-per-watt now matters more than raw speed for telco and edge deployments, where power availability is scarce, cooling infrastructure is constrained, and carbon reduction commitments cannot be wished away. Security at scale: How Intel's SGX and TDX deliver hardware-level isolation for containerized workloads, cloud deployments, and agentic AI applications, with TDX enforcing security policy during execution rather than after the fact. How to monitor application energy usage: What Intel Application Energy Telemetry captures that package-level monitoring misses, including accurate per-workload billing and identification of the heaviest power consumers. Benchmarking against the competition: How Intel Xeon 6+ stacks up against AMD's EPYC 9965, and which metrics matter most when comparing performance in tomorrow's datacenter. Anyone responsible for infrastructure refresh, server fleet management, or making AI ambitions fit within a fixed datacenter footprint will want to watch this one. Sponsored by Intel.

Russia's domestic spy agency says it has uncovered a sprawling foreign espionage operation that allegedly turned the smartphones of senior Russian officials into pocket-sized surveillance devices, though it has so far offered little in the way of evidence. In a statement Tuesday, the Federal Security Service (FSB) claimed foreign intelligence agencies implanted malware on the mobile devices of high-ranking Russian officials, allowing operators to steal data, intercept conversations, and secretly activate microphones and cameras to monitor targets and their surroundings. “This software is used to steal existing data, eavesdrop on ongoing conversations, and conduct covert acoustic and video monitoring of the environment near electronic devices, all aimed at obtaining sensitive information,” the FSB said. The agency said it had opened a criminal investigation into illegal access to computer information and the distribution of malicious software. It did not identify the alleged intelligence service responsible, disclose how many officials were affected, name the malware involved, or provide any technical indicators that would allow independent verification of the claims. As things stand, the FSB has revealed the accusation but not the proof. However, the notion that foreign intelligence agencies might target the phones of senior Russian officials is hardly farfetched. State-backed mobile surveillance campaigns have become a routine feature of modern espionage, and Moscow has spent years accusing Western intelligence services of abusing consumer technology platforms for intelligence gathering. In 2023, the FSB claimed that thousands of iPhones had been compromised in a US National Security Agency spying operation. At the time, Russian security vendor Kaspersky disclosed what became known as “Operation Triangulation”, an iPhone surveillance campaign that infected devices through iMessage. Apple denied cooperating with any government, while Kaspersky stopped short of attributing the operation to the NSA. Moscow's spy agencies are hardly strangers to offensive cyber operations themselves. Last year, the FBI warned that hackers linked to the FSB's Center 16 were exploiting a years-old Cisco vulnerability to collect configuration files from thousands of network devices associated with critical infrastructure operators. So while the FSB's latest allegations may ultimately prove accurate, they lack the technical evidence security researchers would normally expect before accepting claims of a major cyber espionage campaign. ®

The continuing AI memory crunch saw DRAM prices effectively double in calendar Q1, and the bad news is they are likely to rise again by more than 50 percent in the current quarter, if TrendForce forecasters are on the money. The Taiwan-based market watcher says contract prices for conventional DRAM went up by up to 98 percent during Q1. This was good for the memory chipmakers - which have seen their industry revenue spike 81 percent to $97 billion in the same period - but not so good for buyers. The situation is not set to improve anytime soon, TrendForce says, as inventory levels held by DRAM suppliers remain extremely low, and any incremental supply is prioritized for high-capacity RDIMMs for AI servers. This continues to limit product availability for PC and smartphone vendors, with the result that bit shipment growth for conventional DRAM is expected to remain constrained. TrendForce expects contract prices for these everyday memory components to rise by another 58 to 63 percent this quarter. Hyperscale customers have shown a greater willingness to accept price increases, the market research firm claims, which has forced other customers to follow suit to secure supply allocations. The end customer has been the loser in all of this, with the average price of laptop and desktop PCs up by double-digit percentages in Europe, as The Register reported this week. Pricing pressure is only likely to ease if there is an increase in the available manufacturing capacity of everyday memory parts, or there is a slackening off in demand for the higher-margin high-bandwidth memory chips used in AI servers. However, TrendForce notes that the top three suppliers – Samsung, SK hynix and Micron - are continuing to prioritize production and shipments of HBM. SK hynix Chairman Chey Tae-won told reporters in Taipei this week that it aims to double its silicon wafer output capacity – but only gradually over the next five years. As such, the shortage could persist until 2030, he warned – but other analysts have said they expect it to last until the end of next year. Micron said last month it has started DRAM manufacturing at its Manassas, Virginia, fabrication plant and expects initial wafer output at its first Idaho fab in “mid-calendar year 2027.” Meaningful new capacity is projected to come fully online in 2027 and 2028, it said. One piece of good news is that a threatened strike by workers at Samsung Electronics was called off at the end of May after the company agreed to create a fund that will share profits with workers. Industrial action raised the prospect of disruption to memory production, which could have worsened the global shortage. Beyond the big three, Taiwan-based suppliers Nanya, Winbond, and PSMC continue to focus on mature-node DRAM products to fill market gaps left by tier one suppliers as they shift to advanced process technologies, TrendForce says. PSMC in particular is expected to aggressively expand supply capacity. ®

Eens in de twee jaar komen alle correspondenten van NRC tegelijk naar Nederland voor de correspondentendagen.

Spanje is in de ban van vier juridische procedures wegens corruptie. Allemaal betreffen ze de socialistische regeringspartij PSOE en premier Sánchez. Voorlopig hoeft Sánchez nog niet voor zijn positie te vrezen.

Ploegleider Grischa Niermann van het Nederlandse team Visma-Lease A Bike stapt onverwachts over naar de Duitse concurrent Lidl-Trek. Met hem verdwijnt in relatief korte tijd een derde zwaargewicht uit de technische staf bij ’s lands belangrijkste wielerploeg.

Steeds meer defensieprojecten krijgen het stempel ‘vertrouwelijk’, blijkt uit een inventarisatie van NRC. „Hoe kan ik dan controleren of de regering haar beloften nakomt?”

Plannen om een Amerikaans ebola-quarantainecentrum in Kenia te openen zijn met drie weken uitgesteld door de rechter. Bij een betoging tegen de komst ervan vielen maandagavond twee doden. „Kenia is een soevereine republiek.”

Niet iedere technologische innovatie in de zorg levert daadwerkelijk verbeteringen op voor artsen en patiënten, zien Feline Govaert en Kyra van Wijngaarden. Innovatie lijkt een doel op zich te zijn geworden.

Eyeball. [SL silliness]

From cask to car, could red wine be Australia's next fuel? Australia's wine industry is investigating whether its current 263 million litre glut of wine would be better used as biofuel to power cars, trucks or even aircraft.

"Antisemitism breaks it. Islamophobia breaks it. Burning churches breaks it. Transphobia breaks it. The targeting of any Canadian for their faith, their origin, or their identity breaks it."

Canadian PM Mark Carney wrote this speech, and delivered it yesterday at the Holy Blossom Temple in Toronto. Notable excerpts: "We have also reaffirmed the importance of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance working definition of antisemitism, which Canada adopted in 2019 as part of the Anti-Racism Strategy. This definition allows for the legitimate criticism of any government, including the government of the State of Israel, while naming hatred of Jewish people for what it is." "They [the new standards] are not curtailments of freedom of expression. They are not constraints on legitimate criticism of any government on any subject anywhere." "It requires that no Canadian child that goes to school is seen as a representative of any foreign state. It requires that no Canadian going about their day – on the subway, in a shop, at a hospital, at a university, in a synagogue, mosque or gurdwara or temple – bears responsibility for the actions of any government anywhere." The PM has also announced the launch of the new Ministerial Advisory Council on Rights, Equality, and Inclusion.

Darren Schiller has added a photo to the pool:

Coromandel Place, Adelaide CBD

Darren Schiller has added a photo to the pool:

Adelaide CBD

Darren Schiller has added a photo to the pool:

Iconic Mexican restaurant in Moseley Street, Glenelg.
Has since closed down and the building demolished.

Mr Mikage (ミスター御影） posted a photo:

​Donald Pols heeft voor het eerst gereageerd op zijn ontslag bij de Tata Steel. De recent overgestapte milieu-activist is de laan uitgestuurd nadat er onthullingen naar buiten kwamen over zijn verleden als leider van een pro-apartheid studentenclub in Zuid-Afrika. Pols verklaart: ‘Ik wilde die extreemrechtse studentenbeweging van binnenuit veranderen.'

Pols krijgt veel kritiek naar aanleiding van de onthullingen, maar hij zegt pal te staan voor zijn missie. Binnenkort gaat hij aan de slag als kassamedewerker bij de Albert Heijn in de Julianastraat in Amersfoort ‘om die van binnenuit te veranderen’.

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